Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but figure it's worth repeating in any case ...
Overall, I'm really happy with my three-day-old SP3. BUT I was surprised by the display. The display got a fantastic professional review -- since I do a lot of photo editing, that was a real sell. Now, for the most part the display did look fantastic ... until I played a video and dark scenes were almost impossible to see. Darker shades were all resolving to black. I checked a photo, and sure enough shadow detail was zilch. Worst I've seen. This was true whether on battery or not.
Black level can be tested here at Lagom: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php#blacktest.png. I'd love to know how other people test. For me, I could see only from about 13 or so -- that's really awful. Worse still, different shades of black/grey had colour tints. (Don't worry if you can't see them all: with max brightness, getting only one or two of the first row is pretty much expected, unless you use hardware calibration.)
So, the fix. I got GoodBytes Surface Tweak Tool since I read that it had an option to turn off Intel's dynamic contrast adjustment, which is famed for causing problems like this. So I turned it off, and, after restart, it was perfect!
... that said, when I turned it on again -- just to double check -- the problem didn't return. There was bad banding on battery with Tweak Tool's banding test, but black levels were still fine. So I'm not absolutely positive it wasn't a fluke (I played around with a lot of random settings before trying Tweak Tool). In any case, if you've similar problems, it's clearly well worth a try.
For completeness sake: I was using f.lux, until it started causing freezes (like other SP3 users: f.lux often doesn't play well with certain display drivers). So I initially thought this was the cause, and I guess it shouldn't be entirely ruled out.
Overall, I'm really happy with my three-day-old SP3. BUT I was surprised by the display. The display got a fantastic professional review -- since I do a lot of photo editing, that was a real sell. Now, for the most part the display did look fantastic ... until I played a video and dark scenes were almost impossible to see. Darker shades were all resolving to black. I checked a photo, and sure enough shadow detail was zilch. Worst I've seen. This was true whether on battery or not.
Black level can be tested here at Lagom: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php#blacktest.png. I'd love to know how other people test. For me, I could see only from about 13 or so -- that's really awful. Worse still, different shades of black/grey had colour tints. (Don't worry if you can't see them all: with max brightness, getting only one or two of the first row is pretty much expected, unless you use hardware calibration.)
So, the fix. I got GoodBytes Surface Tweak Tool since I read that it had an option to turn off Intel's dynamic contrast adjustment, which is famed for causing problems like this. So I turned it off, and, after restart, it was perfect!
... that said, when I turned it on again -- just to double check -- the problem didn't return. There was bad banding on battery with Tweak Tool's banding test, but black levels were still fine. So I'm not absolutely positive it wasn't a fluke (I played around with a lot of random settings before trying Tweak Tool). In any case, if you've similar problems, it's clearly well worth a try.
For completeness sake: I was using f.lux, until it started causing freezes (like other SP3 users: f.lux often doesn't play well with certain display drivers). So I initially thought this was the cause, and I guess it shouldn't be entirely ruled out.
